If anyone has personified the failure of the Democratic establishment to provide the party with a distinct profile during the Bush presidency, it’s Gephardt.

Those are the first three sentences from a Washington Post op-ed piece by American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson. If anyone, I thought, was going to have something interesting to say about the Democratic presidential race, it was going to be this feisty partisan.

For political junkies like myself, the Democrats are going to be the story for the next 13 months. Then the fourth sentence:

As House Democratic leader, Gephardt clung to Bush’s Iraq policy until it all but unraveled over the past month.

And I just stopped reading.

If the angle of the column hinges on the too-hateful-to-be-whimsical folly of thinking we’ve already almost lost Iraq, then why should any of us care what follows? Yeah, I need my political fix, but today I’ll have find my own needle, my own spoon, my own lighter, and my own. . .

Oh, wait — I already have a blog, don’t I?

More to follow on Howard Dean later, if only for my own sake. Well, that and to show the bigshots how it ought to be done.